Interrogation Company Insists That ‘When They See Us’ Got It Wrong

Talk to anyone who actually knows the facts of the case and you’ll learn that the film was a fantasy. It’s not all right to smear people for the sake of ‘art’ and righting a wrong. The filmmaker should be sued—bravo!

The people commenting on this article seem to have believed what they were taught in their High School Civics classes, that America is the Land of the Free, with Liberty and Justice for All. Don't you people realize you were taught a fairy tale?

I refuse to watch anything by this so called director after she lied about LBJ in her MLK Jr “film” and destroyed the story of A Wrinkle In Time in her “film”. I wonder how many lies is she telling in this next “film”.

This lawsuit appears to be part intimidation tactic and part shakedown. Where is the financial harm to the Reid business? They seem to still have lots of law enforcement customers (who pay them with the public's tax money, by the way). I would love to see police brass on the witness stand testifying that they withdrew business from Reid purely on the say-so of Ava DuVernay's series, and did not consider any evidence or data. Ms. DuVernay and Netflix should not settle this suit. They should take this to trial, and make sure that minorities are on that jury in northern Illinois. And one more thing, a lawsuit like this might very well have the behind-the-scenes financial backing of extreme right wingers who want America to regress socially. Which business spends money and effort suing, just because it has to work a little harder for its money? With customers who generally share its ideology? I hope the discovery process during the lawsuit can expose some of the suspicious basis of this suit to the full glare of public scrutiny.

What a joke. If the series was a flop, would Reid sue? Those cops lied, bullied and manipulated those boys into confessing. One of the officer's blackmailed one of the father's. He was ordered to force his own son to confess. Would Reid sue, if the reaction to the series was unsupportive of the exonerated 5 and sympathetic towards the police??? Notice that Reid isn't disputing boy's innocence. He doesn't want to be associated with the public outcry although he deserves to be. The exonerated 5 and so many others should sue Reid and police forces around the country who adopted the deceitful and racist practice. Reid should have considered the repercussions BEFORE he sold the idea. Now he wants money.

The fact that Reid is an ex cop is no surprise. Police work is prejudiced by DA's and prosecutors who want convictions at all costs, sometimes the freedom of innocent people if that's what it takes. Prosecutor misconduct is rampant in the US. Prosecutors withhold exculpatory information that could benefit the case of the defense until the day before the trial when it is too late. They game the legal system to get the desired result, conviction. When the victims of this abuse of the legal system are convicted, it certifies absolutely the final truth that they committed the crimes of which they are accused, leaving no room for reasonable doubt. They are guilty and deserve whatever they get. Policemen and prosecutors are not swayed in this belief even after the wrongly convicted are exonerated.

man, everyone posting here about the 5 really needs to read the Armstrong report

If you're interested in learning more about this technique -- which uses psychological manipulation to extract (often false) confessions -- there's a fascinating chapter about it in the Handbook for Forensic Psychology. Google this title: The Road to Perdition: Extreme Influence Tactics in the Interrogation Room. Fascinating reading. This method needs to go.

The Reid Technique of Interrogation has long been know to induce false confessions and has been banned in many other countries. This isn't the first time the media has exposed the technique. There was a documentary about a juvenile in San Diego, Michael Crowe, who falsely confessed to the murder of his younger sister. All of the Crowe family members were questioned, their clothing was confiscated, and their bodies were examined for injuries. The parents were then put up in a motel, while the two surviving children were taken to the county's shelter for children, and were not allowed to see their parents for two days. During that time, police interviewed both children, unbeknownst to their parents. They took Michael Crowe, away to the police station for questioning on several occasions. Police interrogated him multiple times without his parents' knowledge and without an attorney present. During the interrogations, police falsely informed him that they had found physical evidence implicating him, that he had failed an examination with a so-called "truth verification" device, and that his parents were convinced he had done it. After an intense 6-hour interrogation, he gave a vague confession to killing his sister. There is a video of this in the documentary. The officers used the Reid Technique. If we truly want to protect our children stop lying to them that the police are our friend and pass legislation where they must have attorney representation when interviewed by police.

"It noted that Reid clients have included the F.B.I., the State Department and all branches of the United States military." If this is being offered as justification ....

The pro-Reid attorneys' argument rests largely on the fact that the technique is "widely used." That absolutely does NOT prove that it elicits accurate information or real confessions of actual crimes.

The Reid technique, huh? It sounds more like what public prosecutors do in Japan, and they don't call it that.

If I was legal council to Reid I would reconsider. Lots of exposure in court and very likely to backfire.

If the company that created the interrogation methods considers it a “drain on time and resources” that they now have to deal with false confessions and misuse of their method, hopefully that is causing the people who work there to rethink what they are actual trying to accomplish with their time and resources. I can’t think that of a better example of the power of art to effect social change or a better compliment to Ava DuVernay than that “drain.”

Any interrogation whereby the interrogator knowingly uses false information directed to the suspect with the goal fo finding the truth is dishonourable and illegitimate.

The Reid technique is in common use among federal and state law enforcement agencies throughout the US. It is specifically intended to override the will of the accused and to produce the statement that interrogators have decided in advance is "true" and will lead to a conviction. Officers using the Reid technique are specifically trained to ignore protestations of innocence and to keep up the interrogation until they get what they want. All this despite the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution, which holds that that no one "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." It is the source of numerous false confessions and wrongful convictions. It is basically banned in England, Canada, and Germany and should be banned here in the US. This sort of interrogation is lazy law enforcement - better to coerce a confession from a likely suspect than to actually go out and do the work to prove the case. Truth is a defense to a claim of defamation. Here's hoping this frivolous lawsuit leads to the banishment of the technique.

Law enforcement is allowed to thrown down a fake folder of evidence in front of a man and lie to them that it contains proof of their guilt? There is a larger issue here than whether or not a TV show got part of the process wrong, the process itself seems entirely flawed and immoral.

This is rich, these torturers are actually trying to defend their torture technique. I would suggest to anyone defending against this suit be allowed to use the “Reid Technique” on the plaintiffs.

During part of my professional life, I interviewed people to discover facts of wrongdoing. I think it is as effective to go over the subject's story many times, and in different order, to bring inconsistencies (in their stories) into sharper relief, and then challenge those discrepancies. Mike Sheehan was very successful in gaining confessions from criminal suspects during his career, but was treated very unkindly in the documentary on the Central Park Five. I have not watched "When they See Us" yet, but I remember Sheehan telling me that he would tell suspects that he "had enough evidence", and that this was their chance to get their version into the record. He would convey that at the end of the interrogation, he was going home to "put his feet up and have a beer," and that they were going to jail, so he didn't really care one way or the other, but they; either were going to get sold out by their accomplices; or would look bad to a jury unless they went on the record. Obviously, in this case, the juvenile suspects, (who were innocent) could not withstand the psychological pressure of the interviews. Interrogation under great distress leads to false confessions all the time. After the advent of DNA, eyewitness IDs of suspects was shown to be frequently wrong. The same has to happen for false confessions, which most people don't understand.

This is rich. A company that teaches cops to lie to innocent citizens (remember these are suspects, innocent till proven guilty), is now suing because they claim that the depiction of their lying technique is not truthful? Did they ever hear the words "Streisand effect"?

Scientifically, torture consists of up to four elements: isolation and rupture of social, familial bond unpredictability incomprehensibility inescapable pain and suffering US "psychological" torture consists of isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory overload, and "self-inflicted" physical torture such as stress positions to "capture the pathways to consciousness" and induce PTSD. Isolating prisoners, depriving them of sleep, food, water, and bathroom, and lying to them (which is incomprehensible to many people's image about their rights and how the justice system works) can easily cross the line to induce a confession by creating the torture response (traumatic stress) in prisoners. It sounds like the "Reid Technique" walks police officers up to the line of civil and human rights violation, and lets them walk across if they chose, in the same way US counterinsurgency training and the KUBARK manual walks soldiers to that line, and perhaps across it, or the way ICE detention centers cross the line with legal refugees including children and families, the way prisons use isolation to torture prisoners in the US justice system, or the way the FBI uses "counterthreat" operations to "disrupt" perceived enemies on their blacklist. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/the-inhumane-conditions-at-migrant-detention-camps.html https://www.byline.com/column/69/article/1696

I suggest they use the Reid technique to interrogate their instructors on how and what the teach their clients.